


Bottom Shelf Blood

by yashkonu



Category: RWBY
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-02
Updated: 2016-05-07
Packaged: 2018-06-06 01:20:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,974
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6732013
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yashkonu/pseuds/yashkonu
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Weiss and Emerald say some things that neither of them should have said, and confront the gulf between them.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Emerald came home drunk, for the first time in a long time. Nowadays she tended to keep her drinking in the house, where she couldn’t get into quite so much trouble. Velvet was the first to notice the busted lip and black eye, Blake the first to bristle with a building righteous fury. Blake and Weiss guided her to the couch together while Velvet dashed to the fetch their modest first-aid kit from beneath the sink.

“Fuck, Em, what _happened?”_ Weiss’s voice was a sympathetic hiss as she looked Emerald over, found the dark bruises on her ribs and the blood on her scales.

Emerald slumped back against the couch, winced as Velvet began to dab at her wounds. “You want the long vershion -- _fuck, that stings_ \-- or the short one?”

“I’d prefer the long one, but I think it can wait until you’re patched up and sober. You look like you picked a fight with a liquor store and lost.”

“I guess the _reeeally_ short version is just ‘cops.’”

Blake and Velvet winced, Weiss cocked her head. “What do you mean?”

“I _mean_ a pair of the shits turned up off-duty while I was at work. Kept pushing me to give ‘em a discount, didn’ wanna talk to a manager. Guess they saw my scales and figured they could just turn the screw. Maybe they just thought it was fun, I dunno. Long story short I didn’ give, they left a _looovely_ formal complaint with my manager that might get me canned, I got fucked up on bottom-shelf vodka.”

Velvet paused her doting to cock her head. “That… doesn’t seem like the whole story. How’d you get hurt?”

“Oh, right,” Emerald added, as though she’d forgotten to tell them what she had for lunch, “Bumped into the same cops on th’ way back.”

Velvet’s voice dropped to a near-whisper. “Oh.”

“‘Oh?’ Am I missing something?”

“Weiss…” Blake spoke for the first time, a word of warning that went unheeded.

“I don’t see why the police would be interested at all in a drunken faunus; if you weren’t doing anything _wrong_ they’d surely just leave you alo--”

 _“Excuse me?”_ Emerald turned slowly to face her, glaring venom, and Weiss suddenly felt the weight of six eyes on her.

She stood, suddenly uneasy, and mustered a halfhearted glare back. “I’m just saying, you of all people aren’t exactly a model citizen when you’re--”

“Model ci-- no. No, no, you are not defending the fucking _cops_ who--” Blake’s hand moved to clasp her shoulder and was just as quickly batted away. “ _No._ I haven’t been a _model citizen_ since I was fucking _born_ , you stuck-up, clueless little _shit._ ”

Weiss retreated a step, looking between her girlfriends with alarm in her eyes. Blake was meeting her eyes with an unreadable expression, and Velvet’s gaze was fixed on the bloodied towel clutched tight in her hands. Something in the crimson smear on Velvet’s hand drove home her mistake. “I -- Oh.”

“ _Oh?_ It’s a little late for fucking _oh,_ Weiss _Schnee_.” Weiss flinched, her tail not curled low but pinned to her leg; out of sight, out of mind. If Emerald noticed her change in demeanor it didn’t do a thing to dissuade her from continuing. “I get _mauled_ by a -- a pair of vengeful shits with shiny badges that let them do whatever they want and you -- you’re gonna tell me, what, I probably jaywalked at them? Does this look like what happens to fucking _jaywalkers?_ Maybe you don’t know the first fucking thing about this, _Schnee_ ,” Weiss was trembling now, ready to bolt but rooted to the spot, “Maybe with your prissy fucking rich girl upbringing you don’t even know what it’s like to be a _real faunus!”_

Silence descended with the end of Emerald’s onslaught. Weiss’s hands clenched, unclenched, her gaze fixed on nothing. She flinched as if burned when Velvet called her name and retreated to the bedroom, mumbling something that sounded almost like “sorry.”

“Fuck, Em.” Blake’s softly spoken words seemed to suck the fire from Emerald’s body, and she sagged.

“I fucked up, huh?”

Velvet patted her thigh. “You both did. Really bad.”

“You’re gonna make me apologize, huh?”

“I’m going to make you talk to her. And you _both_ have apologizing to do.”


	2. Chapter 2

The bedroom was dark when Emerald opened the door a sliver and slipped inside. The impact was dulled somewhat in a household of four faunus, but the thought was the important thing. Weiss was sitting on the edge of the bed, in the closest thing to perfect posture one could manage while sitting on a bare mattress on the floor. Her bushy tail lay across her lap, twitching occasionally as she ran her fingers in slow strokes through the long white fur. Emerald flinched, and not from her wounds. Weiss had told them about this before.

The simple fact was that Weiss was not supposed to exist. She had grown up a dirty secret; born the wrong species but too public to simply _dispose_ of -- particularly after what had happened with her sister; even now, Weiss seldom spoke of her. Weiss’s father had never attempted to hide his contempt for her blood. He insisted that she pin down her ears and either tie down or otherwise hide her tail. She was never to show her teeth when she smiled -- she still hesitated before allowing herself a full smile. A hated pet in a gilded cage.

The only solace she had been afforded was in the small legion of servants that staffed the manor. For all his professed love hatred of their kind, Schnee senior was quick to employ faunus when doing so would allow him to dodge labor regulations and minimum wage laws. There had been an instant solidarity between Weiss and the staff; they knew what she faced and did what they could to shield her from her father’s ire. Brushes designed for fur would appear in her bathroom, subtle alterations would be surreptitiously made to her clothes to better accommodate ears and a tail. She had once fondly recalled a maid, a wolf faunus like herself, who would whisper quiet compliments to her in passing -- _“your ears look lovely, Miss Schnee,” “your fur is brushed to perfection, Miss Schnee.”_ A chorus of whispers to dull the blade of her father’s hatred.

Emerald sat at the other end of the bed, a bit more heavily than she had intended to. The mattress was nice; when it had been decided that she was staying, Weiss had dropped a chunk of the cash she’d “borrowed” during her escape from her father on a bed that could fit the four of them, together. Before then they'd had to make do with a full size mattress they'd picked up at a garage sale, which was uncomfortable for three and a logistical impossibility for four. The choice to stick to the “mattress on the floor” form of bedding had been practical as much as it was financial; it made getting in and out without waking the others easier, and besides, the mattress occupied nearly the entire room as-is. Getting it through the door had been an adventure.

Weiss was still staring fixedly at her tail, watching the dense fur part smoothly around her fingers.

“Weiss, uh -- look, I…” Emerald cursed under her breath. “I didn't --”

“Don't say you didn't mean it. Don't -- don't try to take it back.”

“I… know better than to try. Doesn't mean I'm proud of what I said. And…” She hesitated, looking anywhere but at Weiss. “It doesn't mean I was right.”

Silence descended again, quiet enough that Emerald swore she could hear the threading of fingers through fur.

“When I was… seven,” Weiss murmured, “My father held a party at the manor. It was his kind of party; just an excuse to buy favor with business partners. I… was curious. I snuck out of my room, didn't even think to pin my ears like I was supposed to. Somewhere in my seven-year-old brain I guess I thought I could blend in. I don't remember what they said about me, which is probably my for the best, but… I remember the look on his face when he saw me. He didn't even look angry, just… humiliated. Like I was the worst thing that could have happened to him.”

Silence again. If Blake and Velvet were still in the apartment, they were being eerily quiet.

Emerald shifted a bit closer to her. “When… when I was fourteen, I got picked up for ‘prostitution.’ I was walking home from school. This cop, he’d been following me in a squad car for a couple blocks, just… watching. Eventually he decides to stop me. He pushed me around some, made me stand up against a wall so he could… _search_ me.” She shivered. “He didn't find anything, obviously, because I was a fucking kid, but he says he's gotta take me in anyway. Then he…” She turned her head to face Weiss, meeting her eyes with the shadow of an old fear in her own. “He said ‘maybe we can work something out,’ and put his hand on my leg. I was… I was _fourteen_.”

Quiet again, broken by the shifting of fabric when Weiss slid a bit closer to her.

“When I was twenty,” she said, this time with something unbendable behind her words, something enduring, “I ran away from the only home I had ever known. I stole a few thousand lien and waited for my father to leave on a business trip, and I ran. I didn't have the first clue as to where to go; I had never had to think about stuff like… like where I was going to sleep that night, or how I was going to get around the city. Eventually I wound up at a Fang food share, and I met… I met this girl named Velvet. A total stranger, but as soon as she figured out I had nowhere to go she offered to let me stay with her and her girlfriends. Just like that. I don't think she even recognized me as a… as my father’s daughter. It felt like love. I’d never had that before.”

Emerald shifted closer; their shoulders bumped together. “I was seventeen when I got kicked out. When I was nineteen I met a girl named Blake. She got pegged by a gas canister at a protest and I lobbed it back and helped her get cleaned up. A week later I was living with her and her girlfriend, and a couple months after that I was one of them. It felt like--”

“Like love.”

“Yeah.”

“When I was twenty-one I fell in love with someone I never thought I’d even like. She… she lights a fire under my skin in the best way, moves the poison from my blood to my teeth. She makes me feel like I can hold my own.”

“When I was twenty-four I fell in love with someone I thought I was supposed to hate. She has this… this quiet dignity. Like no matter how much you hit her with she’ll never bend, never break, never give an inch. Sometimes you have to take a hit without hitting back. She taught me that, she makes it feel possible.”

“Emerald, I… I’m sorry for what I said. It was cruel and insensitive, and… and I’m sorry. I love you.”

“Yeah, well… same here. I don't know… maybe you needed to hear what I said, but you didn't need to hear it like that and you _certainly_ didn't need to hear it from me. I’m sorry, and I love you too, Weiss.”

Their fingers interlaced, and Weiss’s head fell to Emerald’s shoulder.

“Ow.”

“Oh.”

Weiss moved her head, but kept her fingers right where they were.


End file.
